Team
(1)

Description

High tech meets vintage, a super cool add-on for my home...

The idea came to me when we were redecorating the house, and I wanted to show our technology backgroud in a subtle way.. My wife and I are both engineers, we enjoy technology very much and are lucky enough to work with it every day.
A couple of months ago, we have installed our own 6500Wp solar system. I figured that it would be great to show the actual power output of this high-tech system on an antique, analogue meter, using the Raspberry Pi to interface between the SMA inverter and the analogue meter.

Since it was not available (as far as I know) on any online repository, I decided to create the scripts myself, using NOOBS and python as building blocks. It's my first Rpi project, hope you like it :)

Still working on the scripts, but when I get them finetuned and stable, I'm willing to share them here. Just let me know you're interrested.

I'll publish some pictures when it's presentable ;)

Details

I'm using the hardware PWM output on the Pi to generate the 'analogue' output. Without any filtering, I'm directly feeding it to the analogue meter. As it turns out: 50% dutycycle actually means 50% output on the meter scale :)

I've just found a cool bakelite vintage meter (Crompton Parkinson 15mA) on a trading website. Bought it :)

The Software is already running, the power output is now show on a (way too modern) analogue meter that I owned already. In the daytime, I'm showing the actual output power, in the night i'm switching to the total kwh for that day...